EARLY EDITION. SPECIAL REPORT. Father of Orlando shooter part of U.S. pro-Taliban CIA/VOA network by Wayne Madsen Report

EARLY EDITION. SPECIAL REPORT. Father of Orlando shooter part of U.S. pro-Taliban CIA/VOA network by Wayne Madsen Report
Seddique Mir Mateen, the presidential pretender of Afghanistan and father of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, is part of a pro-Taliban network of Afghan and Pakistani propagandists who use the television and radio networks funded by the CIA-influenced Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to spread their messages to audiences throughout the world. Mateen hosts a television show called the Durand Jirga Show, which is funded through his Durand Jirga, Inc., a Florida not-for-profit corporation based in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Mateen's program is broadcast by Payame Afghan out of Los Angeles, which is also the home to a number of CIA- and VOA-subsidized satellite broadcasts in the Farsi language to Iran.

Mateen claims he maintains his own intelligence network, but this appears to be a reference to his CIA and Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) friends who are involved in South Asia's propaganda war using satellite programs broadcast in Pashto -- major languages of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mateen's broadcast language Dari, and Urdu.

The BBG has funded a number of U.S.-based broadcasters that operate from the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in order to target Pakistani and Afghan audiences in the United States and around the world with propaganda. For example, the Voice of America uses Pakistani television networks to broadcast VOA programs produced in Washington that involve anchors located in Washington and Pakistan. One Urdu-language program called "The Platform" airs on Pakistani television with an anchor in Washington and local hosts in Lahore and Islamabad. Another show is "Kahani Pakistani," a TV magazine program. These attempts at winning over the hearts and minds of the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan are considered major failures and a waste of taxpayers' funds.

Even after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, the VOA's Pashto service gave a propaganda platform to the Afghan Taliban.

After the September 11 attack, Spozhmai Maiwandi, the director of the Voice of America's Pashtun service, jokingly nicknamed "Kandahar Rose" by her colleagues, aired favorable reports on the Taliban, including a controversial interview with Taliban leader Mullah Omar. It should not be surprising, therefore, that Seddique Mir Mateen's own views side with those of the Taliban. The presence of a number of pro-Taliban Afghan-Americans in the United States was facilitated by the CIA's support for the mujaheddin cause in the Afghan jihadist war with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Even Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations, served as a key interlocutor between the Taliban government of Afghanistan and the UNOCAL oil company in Houston in the late 1990s. Today, those links serve Khalilzad and the CIA well at the CIA-linked Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, where Khalilzad serves as a counselor.

Since Omar Mateen's massacre in Orlando, the VOA continues with its propaganda aimed against the United States. The following are just a few of the comments posted on Ashna TV's Dari and Pashto Service's webpage:

“I hope for a day when U.S. and Britain fall in the same level of blood and dust that Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are." - Feroz Sherzy.

Writing of Omar Mateen: "verry [sic] brave mane [sic]. action is great." -Mahmoodullah Hamid of the Agha Khan Foundation in Afghanistan.

Some 60 percent of the comments on the Ashna TV website praised Omar Mateen and his actions in Orlando. And the American taxpayers fund this activity through their financial support for the VOA and BBG. And, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton championed the expansion of these broadcast services. In 2011, Clinton testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that her department needed additional funds for the propaganda war. She said, “During the Cold War we did a great job in getting America’s message out. After the Berlin Wall fell we said, ‘Okay, fine, enough of that, we are done,’ and unfortunately we are paying a big price for it  . . .Our private media cannot fill that gap.”

The radical messages broadcast by Payame Afghan and Ashna TV are the results of Mrs. Clinton's efforts to expand U.S. propaganda broadcasting. For the CIA, keeping expatriates like Seddique Mir Mateen and his pro-Taliban colleagues at the VOA on the government dole is to ensure a ready supply of interlocutors and agents-of-influence is available to Langley should the Taliban, once again, take over control of Afghanistan.

BREAKING. EARLY EDITION. Orlando shooter's father has definite CIA links. The link between Orlando and Boston is spelled C-I-A by Wayne Madsen

 BREAKING. EARLY EDITION. Orlando shooter's father has definite CIA links. The link between Orlando and Boston is spelled C-I-A by Wayne Madsen
There is one major commonality between the jihadist terrorist attacks on a gay nightclub in Orlando on June 13 and on the Boston Marathon in 2013 and that is the Central Intelligence Agency. Ever since the ill-conceived CIA-led war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the agency's incubation of the most violent extremes of Islam, the United States and other countries have faced constant "blowback" from U.S. support for jihadist terrorists. The older Boston Marathon bomber brother -- Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- and the Orlando club shooter Omar Mateen (aka Seddique Mateen) were investigated by the FBI on more than a single occasion.

The uncle of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Ruslan Tsarni (aka Tsarnaev) had been linked to the CIA. Tsarni was married to the daughter of Graham Fuller, one of the chief CIA architects of the radicalization of Muslims to act as radical foot soldiers for the United States, whether in Afghanistan against the Soviets or in the Caucasus against Russia. Mir Seddique, aka Mir Seddique Mateen, the father of Omar Mateen, is a self-styled leader of a government-in-exile of Afghanistan that is based in Port St. Lucie, Florida. The father's operation, using a Florida not-for-profit company called "The Durand Jirga, Inc." mirrors traditional CIA fronts in southern Florida existing for decades to overthrow governments from Cuba and Nicaragua to Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. Mir Seddique hosted a television program called the "Durand Jirga Show." The show is broadcast on the Afghan satellite network "Payam-e-Afghan," which is headquartered in Los Angeles and broadcasts in Pashto and Persian. Payam-e-Afghan's Facebook page indicates a link between the network and the Fethulleh Gulen organization's Rumi Awards. Gulen, a Turkish industrialist who lives in Pennsylvania and is an opponent of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been linked to the CIA.



Durand is a reference to the Durand Line, established by Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the British colonial government of India who drew the border between British India and Afghanistan. The Durand Line continues as the Pakistani-Afghan border where Pakistani-Afghan military clashes broke out simultaneous to Mateen's assault on the Orlando nightclub.


The Durand Jirga Show apparently appeals for donations, including foreign donations from the SWIFT network, via an account at Wells Fargo Bank.

Entity Name: THE DURAND JIRGA, INC. 519 SW BAYSHORE BLVD. PORT ST. LUCIE, FL 34983 Registered Agent: MATEEN, SEDDIQUE M.

The Tsarnaev brothers and Omar Mateen were followers of the Denver-born Anwar al-Awlaki, the Department of Defense's post-9/11 liaison to the Sunni Islamic community who even dined at the Pentagon. Al-Awlaki was killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011 but his association with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agents was already well-established. Mir Seddique, the Dari-speaking would-be leader of Afghanistan, favors the Afghan Taliban and is opposed to past Afghan president Hamid Karzai and current president Ashraf Ghani and has called for their arrest by the Afghan National Army. Seddique's New York-born son, Omar, was 29 and it would appear that the Seddiques emigrated to the United States sometime around 1986, during the CIA's Afghan war against the Soviets and during a time that President Ronald Reagan considered the radical mujaheddin the "George Washingtons" of Afghanistan. The Seddiques moved from New York to Florida when Omar was a young boy.

Mateen was a security officer for G4S, a global security firm that has major security contracts for U.S. government agencies. G4S Americas is headquartered in Jupiter, Florida. G4S was formerly known as Wackenhut. G4S provides security for a number of U.S. nuclear power plants.

As with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Omar Mateen's overseas travels were known to the FBI and CIA. Mateen traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2011 and 2012. Tsarnaev's travels to the restive Caucasus region of Russia were tipped off to the FBI by Russian law enforcement. Tamerlan traveled on passports issued by Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and the Republic of Georgia. The FBI had Mateen and Tsarnaev under initial investigations but later determined that neither posed a terrorist threat. The FBI has often backs down on investigating foreign terrorists when the CIA intercedes. There is evidence that this occurred with the FBI in the cases of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Mateen.

The FBI investigated a link between Mateen and Palestinian-American Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha who carried out a suicide bombing on behalf of Al Qaeda's Al Nusra Front ally in May 2014. Mateen and Salha attended the same mosque in Fort Pierce, Florida. The CIA's pro-Wahhabist director John Brennan has called Al Qaeda in Syria America's "ally" against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Brennan, while he was deputy national security adviser, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton encouraged foreign mercenaries, including Americans, to join the ranks of Syrian jihadists to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad.

Mateen stated that he supported both Al Qaeda and ISIL (or Daesh as it is called in Arabic). Mateen's declaration puts to rest the argument of Brennan and his predecessor General David Petraeus that there is a difference between Syrian Al Qaeda, ISIL, and the Al Nusra Front. The FBI interviewed Mateen for his ties to the Nusra Front, which has received arms and training from the CIA and Israel.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev became a "radicalized" Muslim while participating in a covert CIA program, run through the Republic of Georgia, to destabilize Russia's North Caucasus region.
Russia's Izvestia is reporting that Tsarnaev attended training seminars in Tbilisi, Georgia run by the Caucasus Fund of Georgia, a group affiliated with the neo-conservative think tank, the Jamestown Foundation, between January and July 2012. Jamestown was founded by CIA director William Casey in the 1980s.
FSB decided to contact the FBI about Tsarnaev's ties to terrorists in 2011. The first Russian request to the FBI came via the FBI's Legal Attache's office at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in March 2011. It took the FBI until June 2011 to conclude that Tamerlan posed no terrorist threat but it did add his name to the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS, which monitors financial information such as bank accounts held abroad and wire transfers. In September 2011, Russian authorities, once again, alerted the U.S. of their suspicions about Tamerlan. The second alert went to the CIA.
At some point in time after the first Russian alert and either before or after the second, the CIA entered Tamerlan's name into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list (TIDE), a database with more than 750,000 entries that is maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia.

On May 22, 2013, Tamerlan's friend Ibragim Todashev, was shot to death in his Orlando apartment by FBI agent Aaron McFarlane. Todashev was being questioned by McFarlane and two Massachusetts State Troopers for Tamerlan's role in a triple murder in Massachusetts. Todashev, a Chechen, received political asylum in the United States in 2008 and became a permanent resident in March 2013. While Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Omar Mateen were given clean bills of health by the FBI, Todashev, who was reported by Russian intelligence to be free of any terrorism links, was executed by the FBI. What intelligence might have Todashev possessed about jihadist terror networks in Orlando? Could that intelligence have prevented the massacre three years later at the Orlando Pulse nightclub?

As with Tamerlan, the FBI had Mateen's name on a terrorist watch list in 2014. However, as is often the case when the FBI discovers a CIA-operated terrorist network, it is told to back off. The Tsarnaevs and Mateen show that the actual control organization for "Terrorism International" is the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Modern Puerto Rico is a CIA creation by Wayne Madsen Report

 Modern Puerto Rico is a CIA creation by Wayne Madsen Report

Last week, in a decision that received very little attention, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-2 decision that Puerto Rico, which enjoys a wide degree of autonomy as a "commonwealth" of the United States, nevertheless falls under the dictates of the U.S. federal government. Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Elena Kagan wrote, 

"Because the ultimate source of Puerto Rico's prosecutorial power is the federal government ... the Commonwealth and the United States are not separate sovereigns." Although the case heard was that dealing with the sale of firearms in Puerto Rico, the Supreme Court's decision. Kagan opined that the 1952 Commonwealth status bestowed on Puerto Rico does not "break the chain" between Puerto Rico and the U.S. federal government. Ultimately, Kagan wrote, Puerto Rico answers to the U.S. Congress. Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, the latter of Puerto Rican descent, dissented from the majority opinion.

Although the decision by the Supreme Court was met with disappointment among the supporters of Puerto Rican commonwealth status, for those who have championed independence for the island, the decision reinforced their belief that Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States in all but name. Recently-disclosed formerly classified Central Intelligence Agency documents provide strong evidence that Puerto Rico's commonwealth status was a contrivance conjured up by the CIA to ensure continued U.S. control of the territory.

National Security Council documents from 1970, classified CONFIDENTIAL-EYES ONLY, describe how two attorneys from the influential Washington law firm of Covington and Burling met with NSC official Viron Vaky on July 10, 1970, to discuss the issue of the island of Culebra, an island 17 miles east of Puerto Rico that was used by the U.S. Navy as a weapons testing range. The Covington and Burling lawyers -- Richard Copaken and Tom Jones -- were representing the residents of Culebra who wanted the Navy to cease using their island for target practice. The attorneys believed that National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon's counselor, Bryce Harlow, has hidden agendas for upholding the Navy's right to continue using Culebra as a weapons range. What the attorneys told Vaky reached right into the heart of Puerto Rico's quasi-colonialist regime, the same regime that Kagan and her five judicial colleagues legally upheld in their decision on June 9.

Copaken told Vaky that the situation in Puerto Rico had to be viewed in a historical context. He said that Puerto Rico's first Commonwealth Governor, Luis Munoz Marin, who helped destroy the Puerto Rican pro-independence Nationalist Party, developed the "commonwealth" contrivance so that Puerto Rico would serve the long-term interests of the United States.

The classified memorandum of Copaken's comments state that Munoz Marin's "principal lieutenants during his 15 odd years as governor were Roberto Sanchez and (fnu) [first name unknown] Negron [Senator Luis Negron Lopez of Munoz Marin's Popular Democratic Party]. Sanchez [who succeeded Munzoz Marin in 1965 as the second Commonwealth governor] spent most of his time in Washington in liaison with the USG [U.S. government]. Over time Sanchez became a close friend of Abe Fortas, who was the Commonwealth's attorney here." Fortas was a long-time political crony of Lyndon Johnson. Fortas was nominated by Johnson to the U.S. Supreme Court where he served from 1965 to 1969. Fortas resigned in disgrace amid an ethics investigation.

Copaken described Sanchez and Fortas as CIA operatives committed to keep Puerto Rico as a stable U.S. military and intelligence base. Copaken's revelations continued: "During the Dominican crisis [of 1965] CIA operated out of Puerto Rico and used Fortas' link with Sanchez to get Munoz Marin's acquiescence. The CIA agent in Puerto Rico was a Sacha Boldman or Goldman. This was the same agent who had channeled CIA assistance to a school in Costa Rica for Latin American political leaders."

The Covington and Burling attorney continued in his expose of Puerto Rican-CIA links: "Sanchez became governor in 1964. Personal scandal -- divorce and re-marriage to his secretary with whom he had been having an open affair -- affected his candidacy for reelection. Negron became a rival candidate and Munoz Marin advocated unity of the party behind Negron. However, Sanchez insisted on being a candidate, and both he and Negron became candidates for the 1968 election, thus splitting their party.

At this point, Sanchez obtained USG support through Fortas, CIA/AID/Navy aid was given to his campaign. There were disruptive actions directed against Negron. According to the theory, Negron's essential conservatism would have wrecked the Commonwealth and created severe problems; hence USG support for Sanchez.

When, however, it became evident that Sanchez could not defeat Negron, support was switched to Ferre [Luis Ferre of the New Progressive Party -- affiliate of the U.S. Republican Party] as the lesser of two evils. CIA/FBI and particularly US Navy support was given to Ferre, and he won. This gave the Navy a hold over Ferre."


Commonwealth status for Puerto Rico was crafted so the CIA could have an operational base in the Caribbean."Sacha Boldman or Goldman was actually Sacha Volman, who established the Institute of Political Education (IPE) in San Jose, Costa Rica in 1959. It was a collaborative effort between the CIA and social democratic political parties in Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. CIA funds were laundered through the Kaplan Fund in New York and then the Institute for International Labor Research, a New York operation headed by perennial Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas.

It has been the Commonwealth status that has led Puerto Rico into bankruptcy and made it vulnerable to the Wall Street vulture funds that prey on financially distressed countries, particularly those in Latin America like Argentina, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. The U.S. Congress is in the process of passing a bill that will address Puerto Rico's current $70 billion debt crisis. A federal government-appointed financial control board will likely enact socially-crippling austerity measures for the island. Following the Supreme Court's ruling limiting Puerto Rico's autonomy, the island will have little room to avoid severe budget cuts and "fire sale" disposal of commonwealth assets.

The appeals of the people of Culebra against the Navy's bombing of their island fell on deaf ears in San Juan and Washington as the NSC memo further details:

"Ferre, according to Copaken, contributed heavily to President Nixon's campaign and is on close personal terms with him. Given this fact, plus the Navy's hold, the Navy believes it will have its way on Culebra. The result is a surface duplicity, while they work out a deal underneath.

Ferre's family leases the only drydock facilities in San Juan from the US Navy; he has copper interests on the island. By cooperating with the US Navy he obtained USG support in a host of similar matters, or vice versa; his cooperation with the US Navy may have been secured by trading for things he wanted from the USG in other things.

Copagen [sic] alleged that there is close cooperation with the 'White House' certainly at the political level. Bryce Harlow went to Puerto Rico for July 4th celebrations, but one of the things he went down for was Culebra (precisely what Harlow was to do about Culebra, Copaken refused to say."

In the memo, Vaky says he told the attorneys he never heard about "the sinister picture they were painting" about Puerto Rico. Vaky also stated the National Security Council "had no operational responsibility in the matter."

Vaky passed the Culebra memo to Kissinger in a July 13, 1970, cover memo classified CONFIDENTIAL-EYES ONLY. Kissinger scribbled a note on the cover memo, which stated that the Covington and Burling lawyers believed that Harlow was "involved" in the Culebra matter.

Ironically, Kissinger was ensconced last week at the secretive Bilderberg conference in Dresden, Germany while the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a body blow to Puerto Rican sovereignty and the Congress hammered away at a plan that would bail out Puerto Rico in return for draconian financial measures. It is very likely that Puerto Rico's fate was on the table at Bilderberg and that Kissinger waxed on about how he once controlled the fate of Puerto Rico through the CIA, FBI, Navy, and Agency for International Development (AID).

Copaken later wrote a book about the Culebra incident, titled: "Target Culebra: How 743 Islanders Took on the Entire U.S. Navy and Won: An Insider's Account." The book was published in January 2009. Unfortunately, Copaken was never able to conduct a book tour to describe for audiences the U.S. government's control over Puerto Rico; he died from pancreatic cancer on December 8, 2008, a few weeks before the book was published.

Did the CIA murder Senator John Tower? by Wayne Madsen Report

Did the CIA murder Senator John Tower? by Wayne Madsen ReportAlthough they were both Republican politicians from Texas, Senator John Tower and President George H. W. Bush became bitter rivals. Documents discovered in the Central Intelligence Agency's archives point to Bush and his allies within the CIA being upset with Tower over his findings as the chairman of the Tower Commission, named to investigate the culprits behind the Iran-contra scandal. The information gleaned by Tower may have also resulted in his and his daughter's 1991 death in an airplane crash in Georgia.

In November 1986, President Reagan named Tower, who had declined to run for re-election in 1986, to chair the "President's Special Review Board" on the actions of the National Security Council and its staff during the Iran-contra affair. The Tower Commission, as it was known, discovered, as did Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, that Vice President George Bush was a central figure in the scandal. Bush ensured he had his own plant installed on the Tower Commission, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who would hold the same office in the George H. W. Bush presidency. The third commission member was former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie.

In 1989, Bush nominated Tower to be his Secretary of Defense. However, the Senate rejected their former colleague in a 47-53 vote. The last Senate rejection of a Cabinet nominee was in 1959. It later became known that it was Bush, who, via articles and statements by the vitriolic conservative rabble rouser Paul Weyrich, leaked rumors of Tower's "womanizing" and problems with alcohol in order to publicly humiliate Tower. The bad press resulted in Tower's embarrassing rejection by the Senate. In other words, Bush set Tower up for a very public fall. It was retaliation for Tower's probing of Bush's central involvement in Iran-contra. And Tower's rejection opened the door for Dick Cheney to become Secretary of Defense.

On April 5, 1991, Tower and his daughter Marian, along with 21 others, died in the crash of Atlantic Southeast Airlines flight 2311 while it approached the Brunswick, Georgia airport. The crash was blamed on aircraft equipment failure. Tower and his daughter, who had just cooperated in the publishing of Tower's memoir, were collaborating on a second "tell-all" book about Iran-contra that was reportedly going to "name names" and Bush's name would have been prominently mentioned.  
Any further investigations of Bush and Iran-contra went down in flames on April 5, 1991 with Atlantic Southeast 2311 [left] and the plane that crashed the day before in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania [right].

CIA archival documents show that Tower cited as one of the major Iran-contra co-conspirators in the Tower Report, Graham Fuller, who was CIA director William Casey's top advisers and a friend of Tower Commission member Scowcroft. Fuller was a major architect of the CIA's training and arming Islamic jihadists to not only fight the Soviets in Afghanistan but in the USSR itself, especially in central Asia and the Caucasus, the latter called the "Second Afghanistan."

It was this policy of encouraging Islamist radicalization that ultimately led to the creation of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Fuller's daughter was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev, the uncle of accused Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. As previously reported by WMR, Fuller, throughout the 1980s, Fuller was front and center during many of the acts of violence in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, from Lebanon and Syria to Iran, Libya, and Algeria, as well as Iraq, Afghanistan, and South Yemen. Among Fuller's fellow CIA provocateurs trying to stir up Muslims against the Russians was John Brennan, the current CIA director who continues the policy with CIA support of jihadist groups in Syria.

As a result of the Tower report, one of the first heads to roll at the CIA was Fuller, who resigned after the report's release in 1987. Bush and his sycophants at the CIA were livid over not only what Tower released in the report but also what he failed to include but knew about: that Bush was the central kingpin in the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran and the use of the profits to aid the contras. Bush swore out a vendetta against Tower, one that would culminate with a fiery plane crash in Georgia in 1991. Bush tried to escape blame by prodding a dementia-afflicted Reagan to fire White House chief of staff Donald Regan. Bush saw to it that Regan was blamed for the Iran-contra debacle. However, unlike Tower and his daughter, Regan did escape Bush's wrath with his life.

Not so lucky was Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz III, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated Iran-contra and one of Tower's supporters in the confirmation vote for Secretary of Defense. On April 4, 1991, the day before Tower died in the plane crash in Georgia, Heinz was killed in a freakish mid-air crash of his plane with a helicopter outside of Philadelphia.

The Unites States Navy most decorated ship (in a single action) by Miko Peled

The Unites States Navy most decorated ship (in a single action)

Part 1: The attack on the USS Liberty, forty-eight years later

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I asked my daughter Tali if she would like to spend Memorial Day this year doing something significant. She is thirteen and even though there are two more weeks of school, Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of summer. So the weekend is always spent doing fun things, being outdoors with friends, and rarely if ever doing anything that signifies what Memorial Day is about.

“What kind of thing? Are you giving a lecture somewhere?”

“Yes and no,” I replied, “come read this.”

I let her read a message I received from Ronald Kukal, who was the first class petty officer on the USS Liberty, a US navy ship that was attacked and destroyed by the Israeli military on June 8, 1967. Ron is one of the Liberty survivors.

Tali read the message carefully, then looked at me and said:

“Dad, we have to go to this!”

“This” was a Memorial Day in event Maricopa, Arizona in the heart of the Arizona desert, commemorating the USS Liberty.

The USS Liberty is the most decorated ship in the US Navy for a single action, though it was not engaged in battle, in fact being an intelligence gathering ship, it had no battle capabilities and was only armed with 4 fifty caliber machine guns to ward off unwanted boarders. The crew were awarded, collectively, one Medal of Honor, two Navy Crosses, eleven Silver Stars, twenty Bronze Stars (with “V” on it for valor), nine Navy Commendation Medals, and two hundred and four Purple Hearts. The ship was also awarded the Presidential Unit Citation. But all the survivors were ordered never to speak of what they had experienced. It took many years and a great deal of suffering before the survivors reached the point where they felt they could no longer keep in inside and had to speak up.

On the morning of June 8, 1967, in the midst of a war that Israel had initiated just a few days earlier - and was clearly winning - against Egypt, Syria and Jordan - the USS Liberty was about 17 miles off the Gaza coast, in international waters. For several hours throughout that day Israeli air force reconnaissance planes had been flying over the Liberty, in what seemed like attempts to identify it. The crew felt no threat – quite the opposite, Israel was a US ally. During one recorded debriefing a naval observer from the reconnaissance flight arrived at Israeli air force HQ and sat down with the air-naval liaison officer there. The two officers consulted Janes’ Fighting Ships and learned that the ship they saw earlier in the day was the USS Liberty, a United States Navy technical research ship. [1]

Then, at 1400 hours, (2:00 PM local time) without any warning, Israeli fighter jets launched an attack on USS Liberty. The aircraft made repeated firing passes, attacking with rockets and internal cannons. After the first group of fighter jets had exhausted their ammunition, subsequent flights of Israeli fighter jets continued to attack with rockets, cannon fire, and even napalm. The use of napalm is significant because it is made of a toxic, flammable combination of gel and petroleum that sticks to the skin and causes severe burns. Eight men died as a result of the air attack and the shrapnel and shock of exploding rockets had wounded 75 men.

After the Israeli jets completed their attacks, Israeli torpedo boats began firing torpedoes, killing 26 more men. Survivors reported that the Israeli torpedo boat crews swept the decks of USS Liberty with continuous machine gun fire, targeting communications equipment and any crewmembers that ventured above decks. Survivor Glen Oliphant said, “I personally recall very clearly from my position outside the wardroom -- that the torpedo boats then circled the ship for a long time firing at close range at anything that moved. Men trying to aid their wounded shipmates on deck were fired upon. Men fighting fires were fired upon and I recall seeing their fire hoses punctured by machinegun fire. This went on for several minutes. At one point the boatmen concentrated their fire near the waterline amidships, presumably hoping to blow up the boilers to hasten our demise.” 
Although communication systems were severely damaged the crew somehow managed to get a distress signal to the Sixth Fleet command which then sent out aircraft to defend the Liberty. Shortly after the Sixth Fleet command transmitted an authorization for the rescue aircraft to destroy the attackers, the Israeli torpedo boats halted their attack. At the same time, the Israeli military notified the US Naval Attaché in Tel Aviv that Israeli forces had mistakenly attacked a United States Navy ship, and apologized. The commander of the Sixth Fleet received an order from Washington, DC to turn the rescue planes around. According to several sources the commander questioned the order which was then reiterated to him by President Johnson himself.

Israeli sources claim that Israeli helicopters flew over the Liberty after the attack and offered assistance but their offer was turned down. Several of the survivors mentioned that at one point after the attack an Israeli combat helicopter flew over with civilians which included the US Naval Attaché. A bag with a message for the captain was dropped from the hovering helicopter, which read: “Do you have any casualties?” At this point the ship was barely afloat, bullet ridden, with gaping holes as a result of the torpedo attacks and the blood and body parts of the dead and the wounded were everywhere. Two thirds of the crew had become casualties. According to the survivors, the Captain looked up at the chopper and gave them the finger. The ship and survivors were left to float in the Mediterranean, miraculously not capsizing, for 17 long hours before help arrived to rescue the survivors and take care of the wounded.

Ronald Kukal was first class Petty Officer on the Liberty, this is how he described to me the very moments after the torpedo attack, “I could hear shrapnel flying over my head, and little did I know that shrapnel was killing almost all my men down there.” Ron was also put in charge of body recovery and identification. This took place several days after the attack, which meant that the bodies, many of them in pieces, had been in the water for days. His very words to me were, “I went about the dismal job of picking up the pieces of a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. Can't put it any other way. Most of my shipmates couldn't stand the smell. I smelled nothing.” For many years the survivors were forced to remain silent and the US government and the press said little about the attack.

In his message to me, a message that convinced my daughter to join me on this long road trip from San Diego to Maricopa, rather than stay in town and spend the weekend with friends, he writes:

“The men who survived the Liberty are slowly making their way out of this world, so to speak. This meeting in Maricopa is sort of a last effort on our part to keep the memory of the ship alive […] what our government is hoping for and always has, is the death of all of us, and then the matter will be over […] I don’t know how we have held together but we have. There is no hatred in this group, and really there never has been, we have only wanted justice. I doubt if we will get it.”

Endnote 

1. http://www.ussliberty.org/report/report.htm

 USS Liberty

WRITER

MIKO PELED

Miko Peled is an Israeli writer and activist living in the US. He was born and raised in Jerusalem. His father was the late Israeli General Matti Peled. Driven by a personal family tragedy to explore Palestine, its people and their narrative. He has written a book about his journey from the sphere of the privileged Israeli to that of the oppressed Palestinians. His book is titled “The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.” Peled speaks nationally and internationally on the issue of Palestine. Peled supports the creation of a single democratic state in all of Palestine, he is also a firm supporter of BDS.

SPECIAL REPORT. Obama and Clinton push entangling alliances as keystones of U.S. foreign policy By Wayne Madsen Report

SPECIAL REPORT. Obama and Clinton push entangling alliances as keystones of U.S. foreign policy By Wayne Madsen Report
George Washington warned America against them. Thomas Jefferson was not keen on them. However, Barack Obama, in the last commencement speech he gave under his lackluster eight-year term as president, urged the graduating class of the Air Force Academy to support all the foreign treaties and alliance of the United States. And in a campaign speech in San Diego, Hillary Clinton, who hopes to succeed Obama in office, echoed him by stressing that America's foreign alliances have kept the country "safe."

Obama's hailing of America's foreign alliances, which Washington warned were "entangling," came a week after he spoke in Hiroshima, Japan of the value of America's alliance with Japan. Obama's words were clearly directed against China. Although the Cold War-era Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the alliance that helped plunge America into the Indochina War quagmire, no longer exists, Obama is trying to recreate it with his military "pivot to Asia." Obama is beefing up U.S. military ties with Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand, India, and Vietnam. In essence, Obama is clearing the path for Hillary Clinton to pursue a military confrontation with China.

Although the "punditocracy" claims that Obama and Clinton were responding to Donald Trump's isolationist signals, their message was more deep-seated. The Clinton Doctrine will be the Obama Doctrine on steroids. Trump is no panacea either. The real estate mogul has criticized Obama for reneging on America's "alliance" with Israel. That comment came after uber-Zionist casino mogul Sheldon Adelson dangled a $100 million campaign contribution in front of Trump in exchange for the presumptive GOP candidate's everlasting commitment to Israel, the only nation that Adelson cares about.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the only U.S.-led Cold War military alliance that continues to entangle the United States, received a shot in the arm from both Obama and Clinton. They see NATO has the spearhead for a U.S. military confrontation with Russia during a Clinton administration. NATO just welcomed Montenegro, a one-time loyal Slavic ally of Russia, into NATO. In addition, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the pathetic neoconservative ex-Danish prime minister who committed Danish troops to the Bush-Cheney disaster in Iraq, just signed on as a foreign policy adviser to the corrupt American-installed Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko. Rasmussen joins the wanted fugitive ex-President of Georgia, the George Soros acolyte Mikheil Saakashvili, as a member of the joint neo-Nazi/Zionist government of Ukraine.

Obama, in his zeal to support for the new right-wing governments of Argentina and Brazil, installed with the help of Soros and the CIA, has propped up the old Organization of American States (OAS), another Cold War relic that was used to justify the economic blockade of Cuba and U.S. military invasions of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Panama. 

With Venezuela in the  of Obama and his old CIA pals, the U.S. saw to it that another Soros acolyte, Luis Almagro of Uruguay, was installed as the Secretary General of the OAS. Almagro is the U.S.-designated Latino puppet who has been organizing opposition -- especially from the right-wing fascist governments of Argentina and Brazil -- to Venezuela's beleaguered socialist government. Almagro was silent when Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, was ousted in a right-wing "constitutional" coup. Almagro now hopes to see the same action take place in Venezuela with a right-wing National Assembly-sponsored recall vote of President Nicolas Maduro. 


OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro not only takes his orders from the CIA and Soros.

Meanwhile, Soros has been rubbing his hands and licking his fangs over the prospect of extending, for the first time, International Criminal Court indictments into Latin America by targeting the Venezuelan leadership after it is forced from office. For Soros, these phony "war crimes" indictments have been used to imprison or threaten to imprison CIA and Rothschild banking family foes in Serbia, the Srpska Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, and Chad.

As president, Clinton will surely continue NATO's "drang nach osten" -- the "long march east" coined by Adolf Hitler -- until Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Sweden, Kazakhstan (where Hillary's despicably crooked and perverted husband* has brokered lucrative uranium export deals with the county's dictator), Finland, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia become full-fledged members of the "North Atlantic" Treaty Organization. The "North Atlantic" euphamism is now a joke, NATO only exists to protect the interests of U.S. war contractors (the term "defense industry" is also a joke) and the House of Rothschild and its front man Soros. The Rothschilds, through their influential puppet Soros, invested millions in Obama and Mrs. Clinton in order to carry out what a one-time recipient of Rothschild donations -- the short former Austrian corporal in the German Army with the short mustache -- could not do, namely conquer the Eurasian land mass and join it to European and North American overseers.

There is a reason why such neocons as Robert Kagan (married to Mrs. Clinton's war-mongering Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland who crafted the Ukrainian coup), Max Boot, and John Podhoretz are supporting Hillary over The Donald. Mrs. Clinton will plunge America into a major world war much sooner than Trump can be blackmailed into one.


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Bill Clinton does not have a monopoly on sexual perversion. WMR has been informed by a very good source in Manhattan that Trump, while sitting next to his underage daughter Ivanka at the Trump Grill in Manhattan's Trump Tower, was witnessed by waiters on a number of occasions with his hand under her dress and fondling her genitalia. Some of these waiters have stated they would swear out affidavits about what they saw. After Ivanka became of age, Trump told Playboy magazine, ". . .if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her." Eventually Ivanka married Jared Kushner of the very wealthy Orthodox Jewish and ultra-Zionist Kushner real estate family of New York. 


This photo of Trump with his 15-year old daughter was taken while sitting on a statute of two copulating parrots at Trump's Mar Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. Mr. Trump's hand appears to be starting a journey that some waiters witnessed it complete during numerous table interludes at the Trump Grill in New York.

What lurid secrets were rampant under the table cloths at the Trump Grill?
It is now well known that Bill Clinton feared that the Mossad possessed tapes of his salacious phone calls with Monica Lewinsky. Mossad was in a commanding position to blackmail Clinton. One can only wonder what evidence Mossad currently possesses of Donald Trump's incestuous pederasty with his 15-year old daughter. George Washington could have never dreamed of such "entanglements" when he warned about "entangling" foreign alliances.

9/11's conspiracy trio falling apart by Wayne Madsen Report

 

9/11's conspiracy trio falling apart by Wayne Madsen Report
The three conspirators -- American neocons, Saudi Arabia, and Israel -- that successfully pulled off the crime of the 21st century, namely the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, are infighting to the point that the layers of secrecy surrounding the 9/11 attacks are beginning to wither away. 

The weakest link in the troika of conspirators is Saudi Arabia, the country that provided the manpower, finances, and hijacker personnel for the cover story -- "Al Qaeda did it" -- for 9/11. Stung by U.S. congressional moves to allow families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia and calls for the Obama administration to release 28 classified pages in the joint Congressional Inquiry on 9/11 intelligence failures to the public, the Saudi government is now pushing the story that the U.S. government was responsible for carrying out the 9/11 attack. A Saudi legal scholar, Katib al Shammari, writing in the London-based "Al Hayat" newspaper and believed to be representing the view of the Saudi government, stated:

"September 11 is one of winning cards in the American archives, because all the wise people in the world who are experts on American policy and who analyze the images and the videos agree unanimously that what happened in the Towers was a purely American action, planned and carried out within the U.S. Proof of this is the sequence of continuous explosions that dramatically ripped through both buildings... Expert structural engineers demolished them with explosives, while the planes crashing only gave the green light for the detonation – they were not the reason for the collapse. But the U.S. still spreads blame in all directions. This can be dubbed 'victory by means of archives.'"



Alarmed by the willingness of its regional ally Saudi Arabia to question the official version of 9/11, Israel weighed in with New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer to place a "poison pill" in the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism (JASTA) bill that cleared the Senate in a unanimous vote. The bill would allow the families of the victims of foreign government-sponsored terrorism to sue the governments involved for damages. The law, which President Obama indicated he would veto, would lift"sovereign immunity" on countries like Saudi Arabia, thus making them liable for civil law suits. Schumer placed an amendment inside the JASTA bill that would allow Saudi Arabia to avoid law suits so long as the U.S. State and Justice Departments certified to the trial judge hearing any JASTA case that the two departments were making good faith efforts with the defendant country to resolve any issues bilaterally. Schumer's amendment -- the Stay of Actions Pending State Negotiations -- would also allow the State and Justice Departments to seek from the court continual 180-day stays, thus killing any lawsuits indefinitely.

Israel is also concerned that it, too, could face lawsuits under the provisions of JASTA. WMR has previously reported that some of the footnotes in the classified 28 pages provide links that lead to Israeli involvement in 9/11. It is noteworthy that the Saudis are blaming the George W. Bush administration for carrying out 9/11 and are leaving Israel out of the equation. Schumer's actions on behalf of the Saudis are a clear indication that the Saudi-Israeli alliance remains intact.

Coupled with House Speaker Paul Ryan's decision, after his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, to not allow JASTA to come before a full House vote and Obama's promise to veto the bill, it is all but dead. Meanwhile, Congress has been inundated with Saudi lobbyists who now appear to have been successful in killing off JASTA. However, the damage to the troika of conspirators may have already been done. 

A Saudi government-linked legal scholar is now on record that 9/11 was an "inside job." Schumer, a virtual agent for the government of Israel, has killed JASTA to protect two of the conspirators -- Israel and Saudi Arabia. That leaves only the U.S. neoconservatives who were involved in facilitating 9/11 without protecti0on. And with Donald Trump already giving muted signals that 9/11 was an inside job, the neocons have only Hillary Clinton to provide them protection. If Trump wins the White House, the neocons will be left as the exposed third leg of the 9/11 troika.

After Obama in Hiroshima: Israel’s Gigantic Nuclear Elephant

By contributors | May. 29, 2016 |

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The criminalization of truth when it comes to Israel’s nuclear capabilities means that its arsenal has been converted into a gigantic elephant in the room.

The online version of a recent Economist magazine article comes equipped with the tantalizing headline “Israel’s atomic angst: A textile factory with a difference.” The summary reads: “One of the world’s oldest nuclear plants helped build the Jewish state’s secret nuclear arsenal.”

The textile reference is to a spontaneous alibi deployed in 1960 by an Israeli official accompanying then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel Ogden Reid on a flyover of the Negev Desert. An intensive construction operation near the town of Dimona, site of the now-aging nuclear plant, caught the inquisitive ambassador’s eye — and “textile factory” was apparently the first thing that came to the official’s mind.

The magazine offers a photograph of the Dimona reactor and cupola, complete with the caption: “Tough times in the garment trade.”

And you thought The Economist couldn’t do sarcasm.

The article notes that at a conference in April, representatives of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission reported “1,537 small defects and cracks” in the reactor’s aluminum core. While the typical lifespan of such reactors is said to be 40 years, Dimona has kept on ticking for 53.

Despite having ostensibly done its time on earth, however, there doesn’t seem to be a funeral in sight for Dimona. The Israeli newspaper Haaretzexplains that, “for political, scientific and economic reasons, Israel has no capability or desire to replace the core, an operation that would mean building a new reactor.”

As for related items that might also be conceived of in terms of ticking,The Economist cites the common estimate that Israel possesses between 80 and 200 nuclear warheads. Of course, self-imposed immunity from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty has not prevented the Jewish state from throwing a permanent hissy fit over Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions.

Meanwhile, the essential criminalization of truth when it comes to discussing Israel’s own nuclear capabilities means that its arsenal has been converted into a gigantic elephant in the room—and a very dangerous one at that.

For what happens to insiders who dare draw attention to the beast, one need look no further than the case of former Israeli nuclear technicianMordechai Vanunu, kidnapped by the Mossad in 1986 and imprisoned for 18 years, 11 of them in solitary confinement.

Blocked from leaving the country (and recently hit with new charges), Vanunu is still seen by the state as a “security threat”—a far greater threat, no doubt, than stockpiles of weapons capable of eliminating vast swathes of humanity, or nuclear reactor cores containing 1,537 flaws.

The United States, for its part, never really bought into the whole “textile” factory scenario, and the American intelligence community suspected almost from the start what the Israelis were up to. But aside from some pressure from John F. Kennedy — who, as Avner Cohen and William Burr detail at the National Security Archive, pushed for international inspections of Israeli nuclear facilities — the U.S. has pretty much been wholeheartedly strung along by ambiguous Israeli explanations of its supposedly peaceful activities at Dimona.

In their book “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars,” American journalist Dan Raviv and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman document a political convergence in 1969 that proved most auspicious for Israel’s nuclear industry: the respective ascents to power of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, U.S. President Richard Nixon, and Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.

“The trio,” Raviv and Melman write, “agreed that no more inspections of Dimona would be required …  Moreover, the new White House team had apparently concluded that an unquestionably strong Israel would be good for American interests: pushing the Arab countries to negotiate peace by dispelling their dreams that they could, with Soviet assistance, wipe out the Jewish state.”

The special relationship has proved enduring, with American weaponslending a hand as Israel regularly wipes out portions of area Arab populations. American companies were also among the entities that previously supplied Israel with key materials for nuclear weapons. Never mind that nukes are a pretty good way to increase one’s own chances of self-destruction.

Meanwhile, should The Economist be seeking to augment its arsenal of sarcasm, “Spies Against Armageddon” provides plenty of robust material. Consider the section on how, while shopping for their nuclear program in the 1960s, the Israelis relied on none other than former Nazis in West Germany.

One character, a Luftwaffe officer-turned-businessman who Raviv and Melman note was “still convalescing from his wartime injuries,” paid a personal visit to Israel to make the acquaintance of Israeli defense officials: “The Israelis referred to him as ‘the Nazi pilot,’ and they went out drinking together in Tel Aviv.”

Shipments destined for Dimona were also procured from Degussa, a German company that “had profiteered during the war from gold teeth and other metal items stolen from murdered Jews.”

Half a century later, as the old reactor plugs away into eternity, one can think of at least 1,537 reasons it shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Belén Fernández is the author of “The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work,” published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

RT: “‘Israel may have one of biggest nuclear stockpiles in the world’ – whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg”

Posted in Israel/ Palestine,Nuclear weapons,War | 2 Responses | Print |